Rayees Masroor:
There was a time when childhood meant something fairly simple: the sound of children arguing over a cricket match, the friendships that grew out of an afternoon spent in a park, the laughter that carried across an open ground until dusk called everyone home. That world is fading. In its place has grown a style of parenting born out of genuine love and real anxiety — but one that, in trying to keep children safe from every harm, may be quietly keeping them from growing up at all.
Childhood was never meant to be only about biology. It is when a child’s social instincts, emotional vocabulary, moral compass, and sense of self take shape — not solely under a parent’s or teacher’s watch, but through friends, neighbours, teammates, and the ordinary texture of community life. Disagreement, cooperation, winning, losing: these are the real curriculum of growing up. Yet increasingly, children are spending their afternoons indoors. Worries about safety, the pressure of academics, busy roads, and social unease have pushed parents to pull children back from the street and the playground, and screens have filled the silence that followed. What started as a convenient way to keep a child occupied has, in many homes, hardened into a habit — in some, almost a badge of modern parenting.
The cost to a child’s social world is real. Aristotle’s old observation that human beings are fundamentally social creatures was never just a philosophical flourish; it is a description of how people actually develop. Face-to-face interaction is where children learn empathy, negotiation, leadership, and how to patch things up after a quarrel — skills that no screen, however interactive, can fully teach. Studies on unstructured outdoor play consistently find the same thing: children who play together in person build stronger cooperation, sharper attention, and steadier emotional regulation than children whose social lives are mostly digital. It is entirely possible for a child to have hundreds of contacts online and still struggle to hold a real conversation or repair a real friendship.
Language and cultural roots take a quiet hit too. A child’s first language is rarely learned from a textbook; it comes from kitchen conversations, a grandparent’s stories, local idioms, and the rhythms of community life that surround a household. Some parents fear that leaning on the mother tongue at home will slow a child’s English. The evidence runs the other way: a secure grounding in one’s first language sharpens conceptual thinking and actually makes it easier to pick up additional languages later, not harder. Nelson Mandela once put the deeper point simply — that speaking to someone in a language they merely understand reaches their head, but speaking to them in their own language is what reaches their heart. India’s National Education Policy 2020 builds this insight into policy, recommending the mother tongue or home language as the medium of instruction at least through Class 5, and ideally through Class 8, on the basis that early learning sticks best when it is rooted in language a child already owns. A child anchored in their own linguistic and cultural inheritance is not less equipped for the wider world — they meet it with more confidence, not less.
Overprotection also chips away at resilience. Jean-Jacques Rousseau argued centuries ago that nature gives children their own season before adulthood arrives, and that smothering that season with excessive control works against, not with, a child’s development. Modern research backs the instinct: children need room to explore, to choose badly sometimes, to solve their own problems, and occasionally to fail in ways that actually teach them something. Strip out every risk and smooth over every difficulty, and a child may stay safe in the short run while losing ground on independence, adaptability, and the ordinary coping skills life eventually demands. The pattern shows up reliably in the data — overprotective parenting tracks with higher anxiety, weaker self-esteem, and reduced resilience in young people as they grow.
The educational toll follows the same logic. John Dewey’s old insistence that education is life itself, not merely textbooks and exam halls, still holds. Parks, playing fields, community events, and the rough-and-tumble of peer groups teach things no classroom can replicate on its own, and the National Education Policy 2020 explicitly builds its vision of holistic development — critical thinking, creativity, collaboration — around exactly this kind of active engagement with the world. Academic brilliance without emotional maturity or practical sense leaves a young person only half-prepared for what comes after school.
The stakes extend beyond any one household. Democracies and workplaces alike depend on people who can cooperate across disagreement, communicate under pressure, and contribute to something larger than themselves. Children raised at a distance from real social friction may simply find that world harder to enter when the time comes.
Allama Iqbal, who spent a poetic lifetime urging individuals toward courage and a strong sense of self — what he called khudi — wrote two lines that feel made for this moment:
ستاروں سے آگے جہاں اور بھی ہیں
ابھی عشق کے امتحاں اور بھی ہیں
(There are worlds beyond the stars; there are still more tests of passion and striving.)
Growth has never lived inside a comfort zone. A child denied the chance to explore, stumble, and try again never quite discovers what they were capable of in the first place.
None of this is an argument against caution. Protecting children remains, and should remain, a parent’s first duty. The real distinction is between protecting a child and over-protecting one — between equipping a child to face obstacles and quietly removing every obstacle before they ever reach it.
The balance is not as far out of reach as it can seem. It looks like outdoor play and sport given real time rather than leftover time; cultural gatherings and community life kept alive rather than left to fade; peer friendships allowed to form on their own terms; family conversation protected from the pull of devices; screen time held within sensible limits; and independence handed over gradually, in step with age. Schools can guard recess and unstructured play as carefully as they guard the timetable. Neighbourhoods can reclaim the mohalla ground and the local match. And parents, more than anyone, can model what balanced engagement with technology actually looks like, rather than simply policing it.
Technology is not going anywhere, and the task ahead was never really about shielding children from it. It is about raising children who are rooted in where they come from, confident in what they can do, and ready to meet life’s difficulties with some wisdom already in hand. Childhood should still mean playgrounds and friendships and unplanned adventures and conversations that don’t happen through a screen — not only bedrooms, tuition centres, and glowing displays.
In the end, good parenting is not measured by how completely we shield a child from difficulty, but by how well we prepare them to meet it — with courage, with clarity, and with the strength to stand on their own. That, more than any safety we can manufacture, is the gift worth giving them.
(Rayees Masroor
Educationist and Columnist, Kupwara, North Kashmir
